Nutshell: Listings should describe the establishment or attraction in clear, honest and concise terms. A business should only be listed once per destination. Edits that look like touting may be reverted.

Nutshell: Writing about travel should be almost as fun as visiting the destinations themselves, so behavior that makes it less fun for others to contribute to Wikivoyage should be avoided. If someone else is making it less fun for you to contribute here, assume good faith, but if problems persist discuss the issue with that user and solicit feedback from others in extreme cases.

Note: New policy needed as there will be more than just Wikipedia to consider, though that is the most likely to be linked.

Nutshell: Many Wikivoyage articles can benefit from links to Wikipedia articles on the same subject. A travel article focuses on the issues facing travelers for a destination, but Wikipedia articles can have deeper or broader information on a topic or attraction.

Nutshell: Make links to other Wikivoyage pages, but generally only link the first instance of an article name. These should be incorporated into the text of an article if practical, otherwise use a "See also" section at the end of the page.

Nutshell: We use Wikidata to make links between articles that cover the same subject in the different language versions of Wikivoyage. The MediaWiki software has a feature we can use on discussion pages, not articles, for making links between articles that cover different subjects.

Nutshell: Articles and images can be deleted if certain criteria are met. If you feel an article or image should be deleted, nominate it for deletion. Some items, such as spam or blatant copyright violations, can be speedy deleted.

Nutshell: Images must be compatible with our copyleft licence. The image page must contain a summary with the appropriate attribution information and licence information. Photos generally should not contain people unless it is a public space and the people are peripheral to the picture content.

Nutshell: Real world threats—essentially threats of physical or legal harm—are strictly prohibited on Wikivoyage. They are never necessary, and can have a chilling effect on public participation. If you do post a threat of a lawsuit or physical harm, even an ambiguous or vague one, you will likely be banned from further editing here with prejudice.

It's not carved in stone

Nutshell: Most of our detail policies and guidelines, and the manual of style can be changed if there is a need and the community can come to a consensus on the change. Any proposed change must be compatible with our guiding principles

Nutshell: Checkuser can be used to examine user IP address information and other server log data. It is to be used sparingly and only to protect Wikivoyage against vandalism, disruption and/or bad faith.

Nutshell: The Collaboration of the month is a way to get many contributors working on one article at once, often to get it ready for an upcoming event or a nomination for destination of the month. While anyone can edit any article at any time, this provides a way to highlight specific articles allowing many contributors to help improve them together.

Nutshell: An Expedition is a special project for articles or images. (Sure, we could just call it a "project", but what fun is that?) Expeditions help us collaborate and organize around certain subjects, be they based on shared interests, geography, or shared skills.

Nutshell: Wikivoyage has a hierarchy of people involved in the community, with varying levels of responsibility in the project. People burdened with more responsibility are expected to serve those above them, and make life easier for them.

Nutshell: Users who have been registered for longer than 4 days are autoconfirmed. In addition to this allowing them to mark anonymous users' edits as reviewed, it also means that their own edits are marked as reviewed automatically.

Nutshell: Administrators are registered users who have shown a good appreciation of the policies and guidelines and made significant contributions, have been nominated by the community and have been granted some additional functions. They are the plumbers and janitors of the travel guide and perform mostly mundane tasks, but also those few tasks which could do permanent damage if done wrongly.

Nutshell: Docents are registered users who know a lot about a particular destination or topic and volunteer their time and knowledge to help travellers who have questions about that destination or topic.

Nutshell: When new Wikivoyagers set up a user account and make a new user page, we usually welcome them to the site with a brief message. We want every contributor's first contact with Wikivoyage to be a positive experience. A friendly welcome and an explanation of any reversion can save a contributor who may otherwise just turn away from the site.

Wikivoyage projects have many common goals, and content that is acceptable on English Wikivoyage will usually be welcome on other languages, suitably translated.

If you are registered on the English Wikivoyage project, you are automatically registered on all other Wikimedia Foundation projects, and can edit any of them under your user name following the local policies and guidelines, many of which may be similar to those of English Wikivoyage. Be careful if your command of the local language is poor, and look out for the differences. Our policies are not enforceable on other languages and trying to enforce them will offend. Similarly, their policies are not enforceable here. If you think they are better or should be harmonized, start a discussion about it. The Travellers' pub is a good place to start such a discussion if a better place is not obvious.

Obsolete: the primary Web and database servers that run Wikivoyage.org are now operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. With rare exceptions (such as Wikivoyage-specific map servers), any issues should be reported to WMF through phabricator: or on meta:.

Nutshell: You as a traveller should be able to take your tour guide with you on the road. An internet café is not always just around the corner. But maybe you have a laptop or palm with the content of Wikivoyage on it. Our offline version is (will be) updated weekly.

Note: We don't have one (yet) officially, although individual users have repackaged our open-source data in third-party apps or archives which may be downloaded to Android, iOS or similar devices. The underlying Wikimedia database dumps are updated at best twice monthly; these may be repackaged at will if the original licence and authors' attribution is retained. As of 2012, we still need an *.epub (Nook, Kobo) or *.mobi (Kindle) version; this would need to be split into multiple volumes (so each large country or region as an e-book volume) due to e-reader limitations on the size of each book.

Nutshell: The software we use, MediaWiki, has a feature to include the contents of one article into another automatically. This is called transclusion or templating, although it has nothing to do with our article skeleton templates. Templates should be used for editorial markup and metadata.

Nutshell: MediaWiki software uses a special code called Wiki markup for formatting the text and images in an article. The Wiki markup used while editing a page will determine how the text looks and what links and images are in the page.

Nutshell: One great tradition in wiki culture is the barnstar. This is a simple image of an iron star, as used for decoration on barns in the northeastern United States. Because wiki community building is often compared to barn raising -- coming together to work on a project. The barnstar is a symbol of that community-mindedness, and is an informal "award" to recognize a user's exceptional community and content work.

Nutshell: To help organize travel guide articles, they are arranged into a non-overlapping geographical hierarchy. The type of information contained within an article varies depending on where it is in the hierarchy.

Nutshell (existing page): Generally, articles can be created for destinations where a traveller can sleep, such as geographical units in the geographical hierarchy (e.g., countries, states, cities). Attractions, companies, transports systems and routine schedules generally do not have articles unless there is a compelling reason for an exception.

Alt (proposed change): A destination is a geographical location where the traveller stays for some time, typically over several days, uses accommodation facilities provided at the destination, eats there and engages in activities which are the purpose of the visit. The basic destination is the city, but destination types include regions, national parks, and districts of exceptionally large cities.

Nutshell:A destination is a geographical location where the traveller stays for some time, typically over several days, uses accommodation facilities provided at the destination, eats there and engages in activities which are the purpose of the visit. Destination types include regions, cities and national parks.

Nutshell: An itinerary is a guide for traveling along a specific route through several destinations or attractions, giving suggestions of where to stop, what to see, how to prepare, etc. If you think of our destination guides as dots on a map, an itinerary describes a line that connects those dots.

Nutshell: Travel topics are articles that deal with a specific topic that is too large or detailed to go in a specific travel guide destination page, or travel tips that are so general that they apply to nearly all destinations and don't need to be in each specific travel guide.

Note: A huge range of possibilities exist and if there is no guidance available for a proposed article, you can discuss it at the Travellers' pub.

Nutshell: Activities that are illegal at the destination should be discussed in the travel guide article if the information is useful to the traveller, particularly when these activities are commonly legal in other places, or the penalties are unusually severe

Nutshell: Attaching a date to facts can be useful to the traveller, but it must be balanced against maintaining a clear and concise travel guide. Prices are generally not dated, but cultural events may be. Operating hours (including seasonal closures) should be included in the guide.

Nutshell: Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikivoyage page. This is seldom an issue, as it is unusual for personal information on specific living people to be relevant to our articles.

Nutshell: The overall quality of each travel guide should be assessed on a five point scale using the identified criteria. Star status is the highest level and is only given after successfully completing the nomination process.

Related pages: links to various pages describing the different status types:

Nutshell: The Main Page is the entry point for most casual readers into Wikivoyage. It should show us in our best light. It includes a mix of gradually-changing information. Any logged-in user can edit it but, because of the complexity of the page layout, great care should be taken.

Note: this page could be modified and used as the landing page for 4.0 Organization

Nutshell: The software used by the Wikivoyage travel guide lets us split up the site into multiple namespaces. With namespaces, each page is explicitly tagged to show what it's used for and where it fits in the site structure.

Nutshell: Special pages are pages that provide a range of information about the information Wikivoyage contains. Through these pages you can quickly find most of the information in the guide, identify problems, locate users, see statistics and even find out what is missing!

Nutshell: Wikivoyage users that create their own user accounts get assigned their own user page. These pages are intended to provide a brief introduction about the user. Associated pages provide a personal sandbox to work on projects or ideas outside the "main" travel guide amd a communications medium for collaborating with other users.

Nutshell: Every article on Wikivoyage has an associated talk page for discussing that article. Talk pages are not chat boards or comment areas; they're for coordinating editorial decisions, suggesting new material that should be considered, and generally collaborating on making a great article.

Nutshell: Our Manual of style is a collection of rules of thumb and guidelines for giving Wikivoyage articles a consistent look and feel. Most of these rules have exceptions, but to put together a good reference work collaboratively, it's best to follow the rules unless they're quite inappropriate for a particular situation.

Note: Structure within an article is described here. Structure of the wiki is described in section Organization of the wiki.

Nutshell: All main space articles – destinations, travel topics, phrase books and disambiguation pages – should have a page banner based on the standard {{Pagebanner}} template. The template should not be used for project pages or talk pages.

Nutshell: An information box tells the reader something interesting about the destination or an attraction that is not included in the listing. They are good for providing supplemental information but should not be overused in an article.

Nutshell: Wherever possible, section headers should be identical to the ones in the article skeletons. The more consistent the sections of articles in Wikivoyage are, the easier it is for readers to find what they're looking for.

Nutshell: Non-Latin alphabet names should be written in the latin alphabet for English to assist readers in pronounciation.

Alt: Romanization is the process of mapping a script into the Latin alphabet used for English. As a rule of thumb, romanization should allow the casual reader to guess at the pronunciation, and the expert to pronounce it right.

Nutshell: The cost of an item should be listed in the local currency unless the local convention is to list the price in a foreign currency. Prices should be listed with the currency symbol or abbreviation that travellers will encounter.

Nutshell: Metric or imperial units of measurement should be displayed depending on the predominant local usage. It is good practice to provide both metric and imperial conversions (local units first with conversion in parentheses).

Nutshell: Times should be displayed in the local timezone using the 12 or 24 hour format, whichever is the predominant local usage. Days of the week should be abbreviated to the minimum number of letters. Dates should use the format dd mmm yyyy.

Nutshell: The whole content of Wikivoyage is available for everybody, provided that our Copyleft license is followed. Besides this webserver we provide our content as XML dumps and an offline version for re-use.

Nutshell: The Mediawiki software provides a XML format for data exchange between wikis. As a matter of principle, the Wikimedia Foundation keeps its open-source content in a readily downloadable format for import into another running Mediawiki installation.

Nutshell: To redistribute Wikivoyage content, you must attribute the authors of the content (not just Wikivoyage), and clearly note that the Wikivoyage content is available under the CC-by-sa 3.0 license, and note the specific copyright for each image.